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"Best fit" to avoid reuse of object instances in a collection

- by Simon

Imagine I have a collection of object instances which represent activities for a user to undertake. Dependent on user attributes, I have to randomly select instances to present activities to the user. For some users, I need to present more activities to them than there are available activities in which case, I want to use the following algorithm. If all available activities have already been presented to the user, then re-select a "used" activity, selecting the earliest presented activity ordered by frequency of use. In other words, try to reduce repetition and where repetition is unavoidable, use the instances which have been repeated less often and were presented furthest back in time. Before I go on to code that algorithm, I wondered if there is some existing pattern I can re-use? [EDIT] "Furthest back in time" is not relevant as I will pass the algorithm an ordered collection of used instances where the first entry is the first presented.

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Trying to move away from PHP/Yii: RoR, Python/Django or ASP.NET MVC? Your opinions please [closed]

- by Örs

I have a CS degree and I've been working as a web developer (front & backend) for about 2 years now. I've been working with PHP mostly because it was easy to pick up and find a job, but I've grown to dislike the language and want to try something new, and possibly get a better paying job. That last point is especially important because in my area (Romania/Eastern Europe) PHP jobs are mostly for people fresh out of college/high school, hence the pay is rather low. I've been working with the Yii framework which, if I understand correctly, borrows a lot from Ruby on Rails (convention over configuration, MVC, Active Record, scaffolding). Other than PHP I only know curly-brace languages (C/C++/Java) and bash so Python/Ruby might be a bit challenging. On the other hand I've been using Linux (with vim and recently Sublime Text 2) for almost 4 years now so Windows and a lack of a terminal would have its downsides as well. I'm leaning towards Python/Ruby because of my *nix bias (plus both look like fun), but I've heard great things about ASP.NET MVC as well. Any suggestions? PS: I think there are more jobs in ASP.NET around here, but that's not necessarily a plus, because there are a lot of CS graduates as well. tl;dr: Romanian PHP/Yii developer trying to move to Python/Django or Ruby/Rails or C#/ASP.NET MVC. Suggestions?

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SS7(M3UA, SCCP, TCAP, MAP) Stack

- by Ammar Hameed

I'm building an open source SMSC from scratch; it's almost finished, The SRI and the forwardSM operations are working, but I still have few things to do for the receiving part. I've built the SS7 stack already, but I'm using DB for saving the TCAP transactions IDs to be updated later to get/generate responses. My approach is this: I created memory table (heap table), saved the TCAP TID in the database, then compared the received TCAP TID with the TIDs saved in the database and then decide whether to end the TCAP session or continue. What is the best way to implement it? I'm thinking of doubly linked list that holds the TCAP TID. Am I going towards the right direction, or should I use another technique other than database or D-linked list? Should I leave it as it is, and let the database do the job for saving the TIDs? Please note that I'm using SCTP implementation available on Linux (lsctp) as a transport protocol, the language I'm using is C and the DB is MYSQL.

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Keep coding the wrong way to remain consistent? [closed]

- by bwalk2895

Possible Duplicate: Code maintenance: keeping a bad pattern when extending new code for being consistent, or not? To keep things simple let's say I am responsible for maintaining two applications, AwesomeApp and BadApp (I am responsible for more and no that is not their actual names). AwesomeApp is a greenfield project I have been working on with other members on my team. It was coded using all the fancy buzzwords, Multilayer, SOA, SOLID, TDD, and so on. It represents the direction we want to go as a team. BadApp is a application that has been around for a long time. The architecture suffers from many sins, namely everything is tightly coupled together and it is not uncommon to get a circular dependency error from the compiler, it is almost impossible to unit test, large classes, duplicate code, and so on. We have a plan to rewrite the application following the standards established by AwesomeApp, but that won't happen for a while. I have to go into BadApp and fix a bug, but after spending months coding what I consider correctly, I really don't want do continue perpetuate bad coding practices. However, the way AwesomeApp is coded is vastly different from the way BadApp is coded. I fear implementing the "correct" way would cause confusion for other developers who have to maintain the application. Question: Is it better to keep coding the wrong way to remain consistent with the rest of the code in the application (knowing it will be replaced) or is it better to code the right way with an understanding it could cause confusion because it is so much different? To give you an example. There is a large class (1000+ lines) with several functions. One of the functions is to calculate a date based on an enumerated value. Currently the function handles all the various calculations. The function relies on no other functionality within the class. It is self contained. I want to break the function into smaller functions (at the very least) and put them into their own classes and hide those classes behind an interface (at the most) and use the factory pattern to instantiate the date classes. If I just broke it out into smaller functions within the class it would follow the existing coding standard. The extra steps are to start following some of the SOLID principles.

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Single quotes vs double quotes

- by Eric Hydrick

I just started a job where I'm writing Python after coming from a Java background, and I'm noticing that other developers tend to quote strings using single quotes ('') instead of double quotes (""). For example: line1 = 'This is how strings typically look.' line2 = "Not like this." Is there a particular reason for this other than personal preference? Is this the proper way to be quoting strings?

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How to name setter that does data conversion?

- by IAdapter

I'm struggling with how to name this method, I don't like the "set" prefix, because I feel it should be reserved for normal "dumb" setters and some tools might not like it (i did not check it in checkstyle, pmd, etc., but I got a feeling they won't like it.) for example (in java, but I feel its language agnostic) public void setActionListenerClicked(boolean actionListenerClicked) { this.actionListenerClicked = actionListenerClicked ? "1" : "0"; } The only purpose of this method is ONLY to set, this method is needed and cannot be joined with any other (because of framework used). P.S. I DO know that question is similar to How to name multi-setter?, but I feel its not the same question.

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Code maintenance: To add comments in code or to just leave it to the version control?

- by Chillax

We have been asked to add comments with start tags, end tags, description, solution etc for each change that we make to the code as part of fixing a bug / implementing a CR. My concern is, does this provide any added value? As it is, we have all the details in the Version control history, which will help us to track each and every change? But my leads are insisting on having the comments as a "good" programming practice. One of their argument is when a CR has to be de-scoped/changed, it would be cumbersome if comments are not there. Considering that the changes would be largely in between code, would it really help to add comments for each and every change we make? Shouldn't we leave it to the version control?

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Weird behavior when using pointers [migrated]

- by Kinan Al Sarmini

When I run this code on MS VS C++ 2010: #include <iostream> int main() { const int a = 10; const int *b = &a; int *c = (int *)b; *c = 10000; std::cout << c << " " << &a << std::endl; std::cout << *c << " " << a << " " << *(&a) << std::endl; return 0; } The output is: 0037F784 0037F784 10000 10 10 The motivation for writing that code was this sentence from "The C++ Programming Language" by Stroustrup: "It is possible to explicitly remove the restrictions on a pointer to const by explicit type conversion". I know that trying to modify a constant is conceptually wrong, but I find this result quite weird. Can anyone explain the reason behind it?

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Does IE have more strict Javascript parsing than Chrome?

- by Clay Shannon

This is not meant to start a religio-technical browser war - I still prefer Chrome, at least for now, but: Because of a perhaps Chrome-related problem with my web page (see https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Iteration%20ReleaseBlock%20Cr%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified&groupby=&sort=&id=161473), I temporarily switched to IE (10) to see if it would also view the time value as invalid. However, I didn't even get to that point - IE stopped me in my tracks before I could get there; but I found that IE was right - it is more particular/precise in validating my code. For example, I got this from IE: SCRIPT5007: The value of the property '$' is null or undefined, not a Function object ...which was referring to this: <script src="/CommonLogin/Scripts/jquery-1.9.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> // body sometimes becomes white???? with jquery 1.6.1 $("body").css("background-color", "#405DA7"); < This line is highlighted as the culprit: $("body").css("background-color", "#405DA7"); jQuery is referenced right above it - so why did it consider "$" to be undefined, especially when Chrome had no problem with it...ah! I looked at that location (/CommonLogin/Scripts/) and saw that, sure enough, the version of jQuery there was actually jquery-1.6.2.min.js. I added the updated jQuery file (1.9.1) and it got past this. So now the question is: why does Chrome ignore this? Does it download the referenced version from its own CDN if it can't find it in the place you specify? IE did flag other errs after that, too; so I'm thinking perhaps IE is better at catching lurking problems than, at least, Chrome is. Haven't tested Firefox diesbzg yet.

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Simple website with a GPL V3 Framework

- by sineverba

I write web-based software and simple website ("Home", "Who we are", "Contact"). For a simple website I'm using a covered GPL v3 framework. The user surf the website, send an email, take info, etc. I repeat: simple website, not a Joomla or Wordpress. 1) Will the website be covered with the GPL? I don't modify the framework. I'm using his classes in other classes... (OOP). 2) For the point 1, if yes, do I need to add (e.g. in the footer) name of framework and his link? 3) I must permit download of entire website to study code (nothing that a programmer has interest in)? E.g. placing it in Github? 4) If 2 is NO, how you can "understand" that we use that framework? In effect no php lines are exposed to the browser... You cannot understand that when you push "Send email" the site is calling $this->send($email). If you write me an email "Are you using XXX framework"? I can answer NO.

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A solution for a PHP website without a framework

- by lortabac

One of our customers asked us to add some dynamic functionality to an existent website, made of several static HTML pages. We normally work with an MVC framework (mostly CodeIgniter), but in this case moving everything to a framework would require too much time. Since it is not a big project, not having the full functionality of a framework is not a problem. But the question is how to keep code clean. The solution I came up with is to divide code in libraries (the application's API) and models. So inside HTML there will only be API calls, and readability will not be sacrificed. I implemented this with a sort of static Registry (sorry if I'm wrong, I am not a design pattern expert): <?php class Custom_framework { //Global database instance private static $db; //Registered models private static $models = array(); //Registered libraries private static $libraries = array(); //Returns a database class instance static public function get_db(){ if(isset(self::$db)){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$db; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it self::$db = new DB; return self::$db; } } //Returns a model instance static public function get_model($model_name){ if(isset(self::$models[$model_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/models/' . $model_name . '.php'; self::$models[$model_name] = new $model_name; return self::$models[$model_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } //Returns a library instance static public function get_library($library_name){ if(isset(self::$libraries[$library_name])){ //If instance exists, returns it return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { //If instance doesn't exists, creates it if(is_file(ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php')){ include_once ROOT_DIR . 'application/libraries/' . $library_name . '.php'; self::$libraries[$library_name] = new $library_name; return self::$libraries[$library_name]; } else { return FALSE; } } } } Inside HTML, API methods are accessed like this: <?php echo Custom_framework::get_library('My_library')->my_method(); ?> It looks to me as a practical solution. But I wonder what its drawbacks are, and what the possible alternatives.

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xor of sequence of numbers

- by ArG0NaUt

You are given with a sequence of natural numbers, you can add any natural number to any number in the sequence such that their xor becomes zero. Your goal is to minimize the sum of added numbers. e.g. Consider the following examples : sequence : 1, 3 answer : 2, adding 2 to 1 we get 3^3=0. sequence : 10, 4, 5, 1 answer: 6, adding 3 to 10 & 3 to 8 we get 13^4^8^1 = 0. sequence : 4, 4 answer : 0, since 4^4 = 0. I tried working on binary representations of sequence number but it got so complex. I want to know if there is any simple and efficient way to solve this problem.

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What is the most reliable session storage in PHP: Memcache, database or files?

- by user1179459

What is the best and most safest way to handle PHP sessions. Is the best way to store sessions in: Database (more reliable, but high bottleneck, slow speed, not good for high database usage websites)? Memcache (super fast, but distributed more security problems, chances of loosing data when the server restarted and chances of loosing data when the cache is full)? Files (default option, I guess slow since it reads and writes from file I/O, less security, etc). Which method is the best? What are the problems and good things of each of those approaches?

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Event Driven Programming 101

- by JHarley1

Good Morning, I previously asked the Q. of how Event Handlers Work (which I got a great answer for). I would now like to understand the basics of how are events are associated with on-screen objects? An explanation of how Events are associated with on Screen Objects: The application registers the Event, the Event Handler and the Component with the GUI Server. When an Event is detected the GUI Server has to link an Event to a Window and then to a Component, it then consults the Event / Component Table to identify which Handler (s) to be executed. I am having problems finding resources/papers that have mention of this process - especially of a Event / Component Table - can anyone clarify?

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Need advice: Staying techie or going the MBA way?

- by SharePoint Newbie

I know this is a very subjective question and I am the best person to decide this for myself...but I am just looking for your views. I have 5 years of experience as a professional developer. I have a decent background in Maths and have done my bachelors in engineering in CS. I have still not reached a stage in my career where growth is difficult and do not foresee this happenning for a very long time if ever because I find myself constantly (self) motivated to pick up new skills. A lot of my friends have however been getting through their MBA lately ...and not from the likes of Harvard or Kellogs, just mediocre colleges. They've however been landing paychecks fatter than me even though they have little or no work experience. Given that I have the option of pursuing an MBA an have my finances in order (and am planning an MBA from INSEAD / IE) would it make sense for me to sell out what I like doing and go for an MBA? Will I regret not doing an MBA later, given that I am in the right age/experience group to do an MBA? I absolutely love what I am doing right now and also the people I'm doing it with, but am just worried if this career would be as rewarding financially as the one after a management degree.

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Programming to ANSI standards (for engineering)

- by Jake

I am currently tasked to write a software to help engineers design standard compliant designs. If there is a bad design, software will report an error or warning. Maybe it's just me, but anyone who has done this should be familiar with the massive amounts of ANSI standards tables like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_Pipe_Size Computers are, as its name suggest, computing machines, not lookup machines. I feel that feeding formulas into computers and churning out standard compliant designs is much more efficient than doing memory intensive data lookups that are prone to human input errors and susceptible to "data updates". I actually think that there are formulas to calculate all those numbers, but nobody so far could give me that information. Anyone been through this before? What is THE best approach to this? Thanks for sharing.

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sharing life experience

- by gcc

I am a student of computer engineering. I have never done any programming before, and as you can understand, I don't know how to study it or how to make my own programs. My English is weak [edited for clarity - ed], and so if you don't like the choices I list, please feel free to provide others. How should I study? How should I learn programming languages? Study completely from a book. Don't study from a book, just try writing code. A mix of the two; study from a book, then try writing code. Study half the book, then write the code by hand on paper. Listed to the teacher, then try to solve general problems (those not from any specific chapter). I have send that question to stackoverflow before when I am at first year. Now, I want to construct webpage to guide fresh students by giving advise of yours and mines.Maybe, you wonder Why I want to construct webpage , I just want help the other student. I am giving a link to that question < http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3389465/how-should-i-study-programming-languagess If you have other advice, feel free. EDIT: This web cite, I think , is constructed to share member's life experience and also I know these experiences is valuable . So I have no right to want your opinion, But I want your opinion / experience even if you think it is not so helpful to other

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How do you balance the speed of Sprints with the customer's conservative adoption schedule?

- by Cheeso

I'd prefer to have sprints that last 3-4 weeks, but customers don't want to adopt new feature/function every 3-4 weeks. Existing customers are conservative and, once we meet their minimum bar for features and capabilities, they like to remain on a stable release for much longer than 4 weeks. Even a 3-month cycle would be pushing it for them. On the other hand, newer customers tend to have more feature requests, and are willing to follow sprints. But this willingness dissipates after we've met their bar. How do you balance the need for rapid sprints with the customer's conservative view of application change? I'm particularly interested in SaaS scenarios.

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Semantic coupling vs. large class

- by user106587

I have hardware I communicate with via TCP. This hardware accepts ~40 different commands/requests with about 20 different responses. I've created a HardwareProxy class which has a TcpClient to send and receive data. I didn't like the idea of having 40 different methods to send the commands/requests, so I started down the path of having a single SendCommand method which takes an ICommand and returns an IResponse, this results in 40 different SpecificCommand classes. The problem is this requires semantic coupling, i.e. the method that invokes SendCommand receives an IResponse which it has to downcast to SpecificResponse, I use a future map which I believe ensures the appropriate SpecificResponse, but I get the impression this code smells. Besides the semantic coupling, ICommand and IResponse are essentially empty abstract classes (Marker Interfaces) and this seems suspicious to me. If I go with the 40 methods I don't think I have broken the single responisbility principle as the responsibility of the HardwareProxy class is to act as the hardware, which has all of these commands. This route is just ugly, plus I'd like to have Asynchronous versions, so there'd be about 80 methods. Is it better to bite the bullet and have a large class, accept the coupling and MarkerInterfaces for a smaller soultuion, or am I missing a better way? Thanks.

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Self-imposed lockout from program

- by Alex

I'm plagued with a lack of willpower. I recently started looking for solutions, and came across a program for macs called SelfControl which completely blocks one's access to a given set of websites for a given period of time (you can delete the program/restart your computer/do almost anything and it will still block those sites for the specified time period, and doesn't require a password to do it.) Unfortunately, there are no windows analogues. The one that comes the closest is Cold Turkey. It has the functionality whereby you set a time in the future, specify a list of websites (or programs - eg explorer, firefox, chrome) and you are blocked from accessing them for the whole duration. No password can undo it, no system reboot, etc. The problem is that the program is a buggy piece of garbage, and in order to ensure that you're not locked out from websites forever, you have to run an uninstaller which is just an exe file accessible at any time which completely defeats the purpose of a self-imposed program lockout. I want to make a better version of that program, or find a simple way to prevent access to a given set of programs over a given period of time with no way around it. I've only taken a few introductory courses in java (math major), but the internet is really having a negative effect on my studies, and the only way I can do work is to eliminate all distractions. What do I need to learn in order to make a program with the following properties: Given a set of .exe files, and a time in the future , this program will prevent access to the given .exe files until current time = given time restarting the computer doesn't interfere with the program, one can't uninstall the program until current time = given time, one can't create another instance of the program to block itself I don't care how much programming knowledge i need to acquire in order to make this program, so please give me a specific list of things that I need to study in order to make this happen, or if something like this exists, then please let me know.

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Specifying and applying broad changes to a program

- by Victor Nicollet

How do you handle incomplete feature requests, when the ones asking for the feature cannot possibly write a complete request? Consider an imaginary situation. You are a tech lead working on a piece of software that revolves around managing profiles (maybe they're contacts in a CRM-type application, or employees in an HR application), with many operations being directly or indirectly performed on those profiles — edit fields, add comments, attach documents, send e-mail... The higher-ups decide that a lock functionality should be added whereby a profile can be locked to prevent anyone else from doing any operations on it until it's unlocked — this feature would be used by security agents to prevent anyone from touching a profile pending a security audit. Obviously, such a feature interacts with many other existing features related to profiles. For example: Can one add a comment to a locked profile? Can one see e-mails that were sent by the system to the owner of a locked profile? Can one see who recently edited a locked profile? If an e-mail was in the process of being sent when the lock happened, is the e-mail sending canceled, delayed or performed as if nothing happened? If I just changed a profile and click the "cancel" link on the confirmation, does the lock prevent the cancel or does it still go through? In all of these cases, how do I tell the user that a lock is in place? Depending on the software, there could be hundreds of such interactions, and each interaction requires a decision — is the lock going to apply and if it does, how will it be displayed to the user? And the higher-ups asking for the feature probably only see a small fraction of these, so you will probably have a lot of questions coming up while you are working on the feature. How would you and your team handle this? Would you expect the higher-ups to come up with a complete description of all cases where the lock should apply (and how), and treat all other cases as if the lock did not exist? Would you try to determine all potential interactions based on existing specifications and code, list them and ask the higher-ups to make a decision on all those where the decision is not obvious? Would you just start working and ask questions as they come up? Would you try to change their minds and settle on a more easily described feature with similar effects? The information about existing features is, as I understand it, in the code — how do you bridge the gap between the decision-makers and that information they cannot access?

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What are the best patterns/designs for stateful API development?

- by Svante

I am about to implement a API for my TCP/IP server written in Java. Right now I have a temporary method that takes a String, executes a command based on the String and returns a String basically like the following. public void communicate(BufferedReader in, PrintWriter out) { while(true) { out.println(handleCommand(in.readLine())); } } private String handleCommand(String command) { if (command.equals("command1") { // do stuff return "Command 1 executed"; } else if (command.equals("command2") { // do some other stuff return "Command 2 executed"; } } I really want to do something more extensible, smarter and stateful, so I could handle more complex and stateful commands and without the method/class getting bloated. How would you start? Suggestions, ideas, or links for further reading are very welcome.

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How does Requiring users to Periodically Change their Passwords Improve Security? [closed]

- by Bob Kaufman

I've had the same password for some sites for years with no regrets. Meanwhile, at work, I find myself being forced to change passwords every two to three months. My thinking is that if a password gets compromised, requiring that I change it several weeks out isn't going to protect me or the network very much. Moreover, I find that by being required to change passwords frequently, I degenerate into a predictable password pattern (e.g., BearsFan111, BearsFan222, ...) which results in easier to remember and easier to guess passwords. Is there a sound argument for requiring that passwords be changed periodically?

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Does it make sense to write build scripts in C++?

- by Klaim

I'm using CMake to generate my projects IDE/makefiles, but I still need to call custom "scripts" to manipulate my compiled files or even generate code. In previous projects I've been using Python and it was OK, but now I'm having serious trouble managing a lot of dependencies in two very big projects I'm working on so I want to minimize the dependencies everywhere. Someone suggested to me to use C++ to write my build scripts instead of adding a language dependency just for that. The projects themeselves already use C++ so there are several advantages that I can see: to build the whole project, only a C++ compiler and CMake would be necessary, nothing else (all the other dependencies are C or C++); C++ type safety (when using modern C++) makes everything easier to get "correct"; it's also the language I know the better so I'm more at ease with it even if I'm able to write some good Python code; potential gain in execution speed (but i don't think it will really be perceptible); However, I think there might be some drawbacks and I'm not sure of the real impact as I didn't try yet: might be longer to write the code (that said I'm not sure because I'm efficient enough in C++ to write something that work quickly, so maybe for this system it wouldn't be so long to write) (compilation time shouldn't be a problem for this case); I must assume that all the text files I'll read as input are in UTF-8, I'm not sure it can be easilly checked at runtime in C++ and the language will not check it for you; libraries in C++ are harder to manage than in scripting languages; I lack experience and forsight so maybe I'm missing advantages and drawbacks. So the question is: does it make sense to use C++ for this? do you have experiences to report and do you see advantages and disadvantages that might be important?

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Are there any off the shelf solutions for feature use analysis?

- by Riviera

I write a set of productivity tools that sells online and have tens of thousands of users. While we do get very good feedback, this tens to come from only the most vocal users, so we fear we might be missing the big picture. We would like to know if there is any off the shelf (or nearly so) solution to capture usage of different features and to report usage patterns and trends over time. Note: These tools are native apps, not web-based. I know about Google Analytics and the like. They're great, but I'm looking for native code solutions.

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